A woman grieving the loss of her father was dealt another sickening blow when a technician she had trusted with her laptop downloaded her private photos.
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"What happened to me makes me feel sick in the stomach," the victim told the ACT Magistrates Court on Tuesday, when offender Robert James John Morgan Williams was placed on a 12-month good behaviour order.
Williams, a 29-year-old Kambah man, had previously pleaded guilty to a charge of capturing visual data in an indecent invasion of privacy.
Court documents show the victim attended Williams' workplace, Battery World in Phillip, to have the battery of her laptop repaired in October 2021.
Williams phoned the woman a few days later and asked for her password, which the victim found strange.
Nevertheless, she texted Williams the password and collected the computer a week later.
Soon after picking the device up, her partner found several intimate images of her in the recycling bin application.
The victim alerted the store's owner. When they spoke to Williams, the 29-year-old admitted he "went too far, that he did look at stuff and then deleted it".
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Forensic investigators subsequently inspected the laptop and found Williams had illegally accessed Facebook messages the woman sent her partner.
He saved seven pictures, which showed the woman in states of undress, at times his phone was also connected to the laptop.
Williams then tried to cover his tracks by deleting the pictures from the desktop of the woman's computer.
Reading a victim impact statement to the court on Tuesday, the woman said her trust had been abused and she feared retribution for reporting the "disgusting" crime.
She told the court the Battery World store owner had initially responded to her complaint by saying: "Rob wouldn't do that. He's a family man."
Williams' lawyer, Sam Lynch, told the court the 29-year-old was a married father whose criminal conduct had "caused strain in the family unit".
Mr Lynch said his client had no prior criminal history and tendered letters from people including Williams' father-in-law, who said "this is not the Robert he knows".
He added that Williams was "quite lucky" to have kept his job at Battery World, which had changed its practices around retaining and accessing customers' devices.
Prosecutor David Swan told the court the offending represented a "profound breach of trust".
He emphasised the fact Williams had accessed the victim's Facebook messages twice while in possession of the laptop, showing the offending was "not a spur of the moment decision".
Sentencing Williams, magistrate Robert Cook said the victim impact statement showed the invasion of privacy would have "irreversible" effects on the woman.
"You had one job to do: to replace a battery," Mr Cook told Williams.
"But you took it further. You looked at someone's private life. You had no right to do that."
Lawyers on both sides of the case agreed the threshold for a jail sentence had not been met, and Mr Cook ultimately imposed the good behaviour order.
Its conditions include a requirement that Williams complete 100 hours of community service within the next 10 months.
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